The Thinking, Walking Biped, part four. Famous Nature Walks: Petrarch and the Great Mt. Ventoux Hoax

I first heard about the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mt. Ventoux in southern France (April 26, 1336) during a high school humanities class. Petrarch supposedly presaged the Renaissance by making this artistic, as opposed to religious, pilgrimage. Some people have called him the first mountain climber because he made his ascent for no reason other than to see the view. An earlier monk (Jean Buridan) had ascended it on his way to see the Pope at Avignon, to make meteorological observations. And other people had probably climbed this mountain for strategic or economic reasons. Petrarch said he met a shepherd on the lower slopes of the mountain who claimed to have been the only person to have climbed the mountain, and he said it was just a bunch of rocks and not worth the effort.

How different it is today. Thousands of people hike, bike, or drive on this mountain. Its steep incline is a famous point on the Tour de France.

Many scholars have concluded that Petrarch did not climb this mountain at all. It was all a hoax.

Here are some reasons for believing Petrarch’s ascent of Ventoux to be a hoax. Petrarch mentions precisely nothing about the natural wonders that he would have seen all around him. Foremost among these is the wind. Ventoux means “windy.” The mistral winds average 90 kilometers an hour for 240 days a year. Mt. Ventoux sticks up into a mass of cold air that moves from the north to the Mediterranean. No mention of it. Also, Mt. Ventoux is famous for its white limestone cap visible from a great distance. No mention of this either. A lot of the bare limestone has resulted from deforestation, which might not have been as extensive in the fourteenth century as today. But most mountains in France have been deforested, and yet few have such visible summits. Certainly there would have been something that Petrarch might have noticed, had he actually been there.

Perhaps most of all, Petrarch made his entire ascent and descent in one day, then went back to the inn and wrote about it before supper. Might we suspect Petrarch, not noted for physical prowess, to have exaggerated his vigor a little bit? Conveniently, he had no eyewitnesses other than his little brother.

Instead of Petrarch being an early Thoreau or Muir, he was actually writing in the tradition of pilgrimage fiction, a tradition that began before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and has continued long after C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Petrarch wrote about how he kept taking descending trails, hoping to find an easier path, only to have to climb back up and do it the hard way. This, he said, is a symbol of how, when we choose the easier path in life toward spiritual salvation, we have to keep starting over and over again. Bunyan could have done no better.

So if Petrarch is to be remembered today, and taught about in humanities classes, let it least be for something he actually did or wrote, and not for the Mount Ventoux hoax.

The Discipline of Inspiration

I certainly did not feel like taking a hike this morning. But yesterday I decided I would hike at dawn today. My body woke up before 6:00 and said, Get up, ya lazy ass, ya said ya wanted to go on a hike. So I got up, and for the next 511 calories I hiked, stumbling at first, and at last. But I decided I was going to experience the beauty of the world. And I did. Inspiration isn’t something that you wait around for. It is a discipline.

The fact that the words and music of “Sunday morning coming down,” popularized by Johnny Cash, were going through my mind did not help to inspire me, written as they were about a lonely man with a hangover. Even when alone I am not lonely, and I certainly have not experienced “And there’s nothing short of dying that’s half as lonesome as the sound…of Sunday morning coming down,” but part of my discipline was to focus the rest of my mind, the part not parasitized by that tune, on the beauty around me.

And during an Oklahoma heat wave, when it is almost 80 degrees F at sunrise, it is more of a discipline than in many other places. All I did was crouch to take a photo of a turtle, who was as zonked as I was, and I found myself panting.

It was also a discipline because the forest in which I was immersed was surrounded by frantic economic activity; just a half mile away, there was an endless grind of trucks. I had to force myself to pay attention to my surroundings. I was ready to take notes, not trusting my groggy memory. I used to take notes on paper, but I now use an iPhone, because sweat effaces both pen and pencil, and returns paper to its pulpy natal state.

We divide the year into seasons, and the seasons into periods (such as early summer, our current period). But actually the natural world goes through its seasonal cycles, and each week or two is noticeably different. It seems like just yesterday when the persimmon fruit was just a flower.This week, the Sabatia, Monarda, and Ruellia flowers were out. Two weeks hence and you won’t see very many of them. And there is no season in which the trees can sit back and just do their work. They are constantly monitoring their environments for opportunities. In most years, they simply let the leaves they grew in the springtime do their photosynthetic work for them; but this is such a wet year that many of the trees, from blackjack oaks to winged elms, have seized the opportunity to invest in the wealth and produce a new flush of leaves.

You have to decide to look and notice things. Any other time and I might have walked right past the new, unopened florets of Chasmanthium “fish-on-a-pole” grass.

Had I not glanced up, I would not have noticed the struggle for existence going on right over my head, as a spider sucked the life out of an insect.

I always teach my students that Virginia creeper vines have leaves with five leaflets. But today I was deliberately alert for surprising variation. And I noticed what I had perhaps often seen but not thought about: a Virginia creeper whose leaves had three leaflets, sometimes four.

You have to look closely and think about things. Yes, I am that guy ahead on the trail who is crouching down to look at horse droppings. It has been so warm and humid that, within a day or two, a sheen of fungus has started growing over them.

I was not the only person on the trail. A bunch of young men came running along the trail, their coach at the end of the line. They could not have noticed the quiet details that I saw, but they certainly noticed more than they would have if they had stayed at home.

There is a story I have heard about St. Francis of Assisi, who loved all the animals (and plants and Brother Sun and Sister Moon). When he encountered dying earthworms on the trail, he would pick them up and throw them back into moist soil. I wonder if, today, they would call him St. Francis the Sissy. But, as I mindfully walked on the trail this morning, I could appreciate his reverence for life. Unlike Francis, I left the worms where they were—there are so many of them, I cannot possibly save enough worm-lives to matter, and they were already wriggling in the last throes of death anyway. And worm death is part of the ecosystem I so admire. But maybe, if he had seen me stop and look, St. Francis would have smiled and reflected, At least I made him think for a moment.

Inspiration also followed discipline in my life yesterday. I am working on what might be the most significant novel that I will ever write, a rewrite of a rewrite of a 1991 rewrite of a 1990 manuscript. I had the ending pretty much tied up in the original version, or so I thought, but I realized yesterday there were too many loose ends, characters and continents left dangling. I had to write a new ending to the novel. I really did not feel like it, nor did I have a clue how I was going to do this. But I just decided to start. The wellsprings of creativity soon carried me away and I wrote 7400 words of an ending I could not have guessed even earlier the same day. This creative work took a lot out of me. I don’t think I could do it today, but there is no day on which I can write anything unless I undertake the discipline of inviting my mind to unleash its creativity.

So perhaps the best time for a nature walk is when you are disinclined to it. The great composer Antonín Dvořák routinely took a sunrise nature walk. Today is one of the few days that I have done so, but I tasted a little bit of the inspiration he felt. But even for a genius like Dvořák, inspiration only came in after discipline had opened the door.